


the dead world

by lejf



Series: toppling tower [4]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 03:44:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6736741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/lejf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No Sburb. Nothing. Nada. </p><p>Just Dirk, alone in the great wide sea, looking for the friends he'll never meet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the dead world

 

 

Welcome to a world of quiet.

 

Everyone is gone. Not dead. Just gone. One day human life was just swiped clean away. 

The internet is a graveyard, a cyberspace, filled with slumping corpse websites. One of the bodies has its mouth still agape, crying out into the night. Hello? Is anyone still out there? One day nobody turned up to my ward, and the hospital is dead-silent and rundown. The electricity is going to run out soon. I can see the sea outside, but it shouldn’t be there. Hello? Is there anybody there? Am I alone? Where did everybody go?

 

 

Dirk first saw that cry, the most recent activity in the whole of the world wide web, nine years ago. It had been seven years due and rotting. 

 

Outside, the sea is filled with life but not –– life that he wishes he could live, life so blissfully  _stupid,_ unknowing what they'd ever lost. The fish and the birds, their gleeful cries silent in his ears.

There is nobody but him. 

Not one soul.

Until–

She is a breath of fresh air. Meeting her is a burst of light, then a melting of slow-curling honey. He learns all about what she loves, what she lives in –– the white, the cut lines –– learns that his loneliness is echoed all the way across the world.

And then there is another.

And another.

And he has  _friends._ Each as lonely as the next. He falls in love with each and every one of them, their each and every side. Something about them seems familiar, as if they were all fragments of the same lone body, drawn together as surely as clouds towards a mountain peak.  _Let me see you. Let me know that you’re real. Tell me I’m not worthless and alone, rusting under this clear merciless sky._

They tell him that they have white hair, just like him; black hair; brilliant pink eyes, blue like the sky, green like the kelp forests. 

The blue around him is a world that goes where sea ends and the sky begins, where the sky ends, where the sea begins. There’s no difference, really. The ouroboros of blue, of black, goes head to tail, head to tail, sweeping over in clouds and weather and choppy waves. He knows that in the grand scheme of things, one ocean and one apartment is nothing. But to him, the world in the apartment is so much greater than that world of blue. He doesn’t build any sort of AI. Never re-prints himself. Just works with the circuitry, builds up his solar panels, focuses on staying alive.

Until–

He unfurls his sails and sets out into the ocean blue. 

_I don’t want to be alone._

Following numbers and commas he’s etched into the boat-side, following the merciless sky. He turns away from his digital world to traverse the real. 

Across oceans and seas, across deserts and forests, the green, green, green. He’s looking for her. He’s looking for him. He’s looking for friends. He’s looking for a lover. He’s looking for a reason to live.

He’s here. 

 

 

 

And he is alone.

There is no laboratory, no scope of white aimed towards the sun, no rushing waterfall, no rainbow rivers, nothing. It’s all empty. Empty, empty, empty, the rushing of wind and grass. Flowers with downturned heads.

He’s still cut off and adrift from the internet. It’s not out here – not in the dead world. He wants to message Roxy, demand. Has she lied to him?

Frustrated, travelling with spark of darkness in him, an anger, a _fear,_ he goes to the next. This time he sails, rows, hunkers down through storms and manoeuvres through the waves. He sees it! An island, rising up and out. His beacon. A stone statue peeking above the trees, the one Jake always talked about. 

He follows the coastline. Footprints trail behind him on the sandy shores. Footprints that by three nightfalls, he’s stumbles across again. Jake must live deeper. Dirk delves into the woods, that dark void in him growing growing like a black hole, threatening. 

There is no soul living on this island. A statue, overgrown and forlorn, nothing else. No sign of human inhabitance. No cut trees, no smoke or satellites. This can’t be.

This time he sails out into the sea with his heart at his feet, bleeding and raw. Have they lied all this time? He floats all the way home, to where the seagulls have nested onto the roof and the rooms seems sad, dying. The outside blue really held no promises at all. Only broke them.

Pesterchum connects with a _ping!_ And–

GT: I’m sorry.

GG: I’m sorry.

TG: I’m sorry.

All in perfect synchrony. Sent five months, fifteen days ago.

He shuts down the computer and walks out under the sun, casts out his fishing rod and throws himself back into his routine. Scale the fish. Gut it. Pretend he’d never left. But the dark corners are darker now, and he doesn’t want to look at his screen, his cursed screen, doesn’t want to think about what it all means.

It boils down to something very simple.

_You are alone._

Maybe he should build rather than destroy, let lenses blink open rather than kill and chew. But his heart is so heavy, heavier than the steel he holds in his hands. Jane and Roxy and Jake were not real. He does not want to– make something like _them_.

Some days he is angry. He throws things, lets the anger out like shards of flashing glass, a whirlwind, but then he is left hollow in a room with tearing wallpaper walls. Other days he sits and watches the sunset and pushes himself off the edge, hits the water and it _stings,_ lets the water hold him close –  _I’m here for you, stay with me, drown in me –_ and then kicks his way up to the surface. Wonders how hard it’d be to die. 

One day the computer _pings_ and although that darkness in him has grown into a storm, he looks.

TT: I’m sorry.

Who is this? He has never met this person before. They are using his handle.

TT: I’m so sorry.

He just sits and watches the red text. Flash flash, some more empty promises of life. 

TT: I didn’t mean to hurt you.  
TT: I didn’t think there’d still be anybody out there.  
TT: I thought I was alone.

The words sound so much like _Roxy’s._ Like Jake’s. Like Jane’s. Lies, all lies, lies, lies.

TT: I set them free because I couldn’t bear to exist with them anymore.  
TT: You have no idea what it’s like to live with the ghosts you’ve dug up from their graves and imitated in metal shells. You have no idea.  
TT: It’s joy and it’s agony. Until the pain grows too wild and it rips you out from the inside.  
TT: Who are you? Are you human?  
TT: No. I am not.  
TT: Then you mean nothing to me.

He closes his computer and does not look back again. The sea washes him out until he is bleached and empty. He has given up hope. He has given up everything.

The day comes when he wakes to a _bang_ and he is frightened, so frightened, but he takes out a sword and peers out the doorway. 

There is a person in the kitchen. Standing, silhouetted by the sun, the door behind them broken on its hinges. 

His heart beats in fear, and– does he dare– _hope?_

There is a quiet whirr, and the person looks up and their face is all metal, but he doesn’t care –– there is someone who thinks and is real, who can break down doors and stand there in the sunlight, red eyes flashing. They drink each other in as though dying, even though the sea surrounds them.

“I am not human.” the person says, and Dirk laughs. He can’t remember ever laughing. But he is, now, and his throat almost hurts from it. The person looks concerned, and it– _he_ takes a step forward and raises a hesitant hand. He looks so human. So real. He _is_ so human. He is the one who put himself in Roxy, in Jake, and Jane– _he_ is the one who feels the loneliness like a burden –– he is the one Dirk has been talking to all the time.

Dirk sinks down to the floor and the world must be swirling. 

The metal boy looks down at him and whirrs.

“You were furious about Roxy and Jake and Jane,” he says, “but they were as real as me. More real.”

“You made them,” Dirk says. 

“I imitated them.” the metal boy corrects, “I have been living here for years. Decades. Centuries. They were the only people I had ever met, but each of them came to die, and each of them– I extrapolated. Made up from what little I knew of their lives.”

The strikes him, suddenly, like a gunshot to the chest. “Roxy died ten years ago. I saw her message.”

The metal boy looks away, red lenses hooded. “I could not cross the globe in time. She was only hours dead when I arrived.” he looks at Dirk, again, this time his eyes flaring bright. “But do you see? Those programs you spoke to– they were echoes of humans. Jake I’d lived with until he grew old. Jane also. Roxy handed me her life all while she died. They were human. I am not."

“You are,” Dirk says, through the blur, thinking of the friends he’d made that had never been real at all, “you _are._ "

And from then, his world –– not the one of the blue, of the sky and the sea, of rippling green; but the familiar rooms, the sunlit rooms –– from then on, his world blooms free of its quiet and sings with noise.

**Author's Note:**

> i guess they live in a weird in-between world where occasionally people get transported. 
> 
> ??
> 
> not really sure. just thought about dirk chasing ghosts and AR being the creator of those ghosts


End file.
